Hopefully you will be listening.
Oh, yes, they sing. And they whisper, and giggle, and warble, and laugh, and burp. They roar and I'm sure some of them scream. They talk all the time, from love murmurs to angry protestations, and on the nether side, to use the nice term, they crepitate--in other words, they are alive. Very much so. The only time they sleep it is the sleep of the dead behind some grotesque dam; some block of man-made cement that hangs around their joyful necks and shackles them into slavery. Even then their ghosts are restless, angry ghosts--probing, crawling, vaporizing...and, heh-heh...waiting.
In Glen Canyon, when it was a Canyon and not the Foul Race- track Reservoir it has become, the Colorado River was laid back in the embrace of more than one hundred beautiful side streams and canyons. There he became a gentle lover. (The River has always been a HE to me, but we really discount gender here--it's the spirit that counts). After much teasing and playing around in Cataract and before his wild sex orgy in the Grand Canyon, there in a glen like its name, is where the river took his time, his R & R, between those high, reverberating canyon walls. And there is where he sang his most entrancing songs...at least to me.
My first trip on that great river was through the Grand Canyon and since I'd been asked to bring my guitar and sing around the campfire at day's end, I brought with me the songs I knew, the folksongs I sang on radio, in coffee houses and in concert. None of them were songs about rivers, especially this river, and they didn't sound quite right to me down there in the beginnings of the earth with its deep-throated sounds of power echoing up or down from a rapid.
I knew a lot of Irish, English, Early American ballads, Cowboy and Western songs that were popular in that folk era of the fifties. In particular I remember a ballad Burl Ives had taught me--"One Hour Ahead of the Posse"--it fascinated Big Johnny Harper, our boatmen, and I had to sing it every night; not that I minded, it was the sort of raucous, galloping song that didn't seem too foreign down there in the wildness of the Grand. But when we camped on the, mile long, river-laid, clean, untracked beaches (that no longer exist), beside quiet riffles that chortled their chocolate tunes--my songs didn't seem to cut it.
So, with the sounds of the river's eccentric melodies in my ear--the new music I'd found there--I wrote some words that fit the place. Did it before I even knew it was done, but sang it to a tune I had borrowed from a popular songwriter friend. Why not to my own tune? It was too soon. I hadn't yet learned how to read the river's special score.
Then I met Glen Canyon. On a blackout kind of night in the summer of 1954, sitting above the river on a sandstone bench watching stars ride a riffle, watching them slip and bob and couple and split and ride again, polygamously changing mates on the rippled surface, I heard and was able to read that score. Not only the music but the words. It became a matter of the time I spent there, the quietness all around me, no foreign stimuli to bombard me with trivia. There was open space and beauty beyond description to be filled with only my private thoughts and the songs of moving water, but I had to learn the listening process before I could understand his chatter, his moods--his anger, laughter and his whispered secrets. Learning that singular language, honed all my other senses as well to an awareness of, among other things, rhythm.
A rhythmic river! I had never thought of that before. Through a violent storm, from faraway timpani drums to crashing symbols of lightning and unleashed, thundering waterfalls, there would not only be a change of rhythm but a change of key, and afterward, some of the finest music of all. From the canyon, rather than the river, I could hear notes clear up and down the scale in harmonies, with syncopation--water drops falling into pools of every size and depth, like music played on a xylophone.As anyone can tell you who has ever been on a river listening to human music--a guitar, a flute, violin, harmonica, whatever--it sounds different there than anywhere else.
First of all, mostly unnoticed by the novice, is the accompaniment from the river itself; then, the enhancement and enlargement of the notes as they pass over, around, and back to the listeners from the canyon walls. But it is the river's accompaniment that is missed when one hears the same song on the same instrument played elsewhere. The echo, the feedback, can be falsely addressed by electronics but electric is how it will sound. Never, can it or will it, replace the natural acoustics that resound from the Canyon's cathedrals, over- hangs, walls and alcoves.
Absent will be the underlying support to the music--subtle, but imperative--the backup musician. The river. For reasons unexplainable--except that our senses do play in symphony--color, especially in Glen Canyon, added a kind of magic to the music there. An assortment of musicians--a few?--many?-- anyhow some that I know, see color in their minds that isn't right before their eyes. Had I been a composer of symphonies, that Canyon would have been the place to transmit vivid color into sound. Even in my simple, folky form of music--I play by ear and hardly know more than twenty chords--after being in the Glen, I could see color in a melody.
The attention I gave to what the river was saying and singing helped me store the vision, the sounds and color in my memory--one that saved my dear butt time after time from life's many encounters with anger and despair. Dear god, the nights I've spent in supper clubs, coffee houses, concert halls and auditoriums with hi-tec-state-of-the-art-equipment, and never once heard a sound return to me like a river's singing. Standing under the spotlight in full makeup, pantyhose, high heels and sometimes even a wig--if I'd gone swimming that afternoon--befogged in cigar and cigarette smoke as blue and dense as what rose from the stacks of the steel mills in Gary, Indiana, and underlying all, the sludge of stale booze that smelled like a wet moose in rut, I could flash on the memory of my river's music...hear that underlying throb...see the vivid color surrounding it...and tease my brain into being where that pure earthy melody originated. After that, I would wait...wait...wait for the day...when I would be again at Hite.
I closed my gig at the Hungry Eye in San Francisco, stashed the guitar in my already packed T-Bird and headed for Reno at two in the morning--a great time to drive, smooth, speedy, trafficless --I'd done it before. Many times. Somewhere past Vallejo I pulled to the side of the road, stripped off pantyhose, bra and black chiffon, wiggled into jeans and drove hard and fast, still under the stimulus of a "performance high." When dawn spread across the Carson Valley plains, I pulled into a motel near Truckee and flaked out for four hours, awoke in early morning sunshine, ate, coffeed heavily and drove the black ribbon that pulled me toward The River.
As I arrowed into a horizon of foaming suds with bottoms of dingy grey, about to be dumped on the low hills, I felt like a homing pigeon winging over the wide, familiar desert that holds me and other Westerners captive. Through hammering rain that pulled the knockout incense of sage and creosote and wetted silt from the earth, I pushed the Bird past the Great Salty into Greenriver, Utah, where I slept on Ken Sleight's lawn until dawn.
Deserts hum. Oh, yes. They whistle and toot and click. Rustle, scratch and thump the tabla. In our western theatre of sound deserts provide the percussion. Under stormy heavens they vibrate the snares across their taught skins, playing strident Sousa marches. Another day, another theatre, and we're given soft fripps of the brush across their sounding skins in rhythm to the wind. Deserts play woodwind sounds through fluted stone--their most captivating sound of all. Like a siren call, it is.
Once Upon A Glen I stood in a sequestered gracility, a erotic sinuosity, a three foot wide, six-hundred foot deep fluted canyon (I have never stood in a slot) and heard a melody so out-of-this-world I could not capture it again. Couldn't hum it, sing it, or remember any tune--only its gentle persuasion to take me to another place, a place I'd never entered before.
From Ken's lawn toward Hanksville, dry and wet streambeds vein out from the knuckle-raised fists of the San Rafael Swell and the Reef running south that parallels the Green river above its junction with the Colorado. Red-orange-yellow-pink-buff-purple cliffs clutch at dark green juniper and pinon on top of the Reef like lustful fingers tangled in unruly hair. The drive from there to the River was pure sensation.
Beyond Hanksville, the Summerville formation like sheaves of rippled wet parchment crumble beneath the snow-tipped Henry Mountains to the west; while south and east rise the Colorado Plateau. My track paralleled the Dirty Devil River before it plunged into a deep red heart of hobby-knobby-chocolate-drops that cordoned the river above Hite--Moenkopi Mudstone--a fiery furnace that some called hell. I called it heaven. Then I braved the unknown.
Not exactly the unknown, I'd come that way more than once with someone else driving the nothing-but-sand-silt-rutted-rocky- road from Hanksville, around Little Egypt, over the dunes and down North Wash--one of the hundred or more side canyons into the Glen. No bridge spanned those several hundred sinuous miles of river from Ken's to Marble Canyon, Arizona then. This time, I was alone in terrain where I could be up to my crotch in crocodiles before someone came along to pull me and my low-slung '55 T-Bird out of the dunes.
Well, I was damned if I'd go all the way around through Moab- Monticello-Blanding-and down Farley Canyon two hundred more miles to the river. So what, if there were seventy-five to a hundred crossings of North Wash?--that's the way the biscuit falls to pieces. I'd do it. Be there by late afternoon. (Take a look at it sometime as you go from New Hite to the Pissing Springs turnoff--yeah, that's what the Mormon cowboys called it before the map makers got to it--you'll enter North Wash on an elevated, bitumen highway now and can't see the bottom until you get miles up the canyon). Lucky for me the rain had traveled from the Great Salty down Hanksville way, or I'd be there yet. It doused the dunes enough to harden them for my tricky but triumphant crawl across to the Wash.
I plowed, crawled and burrowed through them, whatever seemed right, only got stuck a couple times--a few rocks, my shovel and the dunes let me go...down to the rocks in a mostly bedrock streambed where I found a more or less constant trickle left over from what had been a dandy flush of the system some twelve hours earlier. Fleshy mounds of petrified Navajo dunes poked up on all sides of my vision, hardly discernable from the soft moving ones that obliterated a good part of the road.
Many times I stopped, got out and listened to the desert, the stream and the rock. It hummmmmed--and moaned. I would spread my arms, lie down and press my body into those sensuous curves--just couldn't pass up a rippled crev- asse, a set of Moki steps or a soft, round bum with potholes up its crack. One ragged hump spit at me as I reached up for a handhold, and beneath an alcove, with cicadas cavorting in a cottonwood by the Wash, I had to cover my ears--they sounded like four-hundred six-year-olds practicing the violin!
As I neared the River, about fifteen miles from the drop into North Wash, winding down through Navajo, Kayenta, Wingate sand- stone, I stopped for the last time between towering Moenkopi bon-bons, barely wide enough for the Bird's passing, to listen for what I knew I would hear. It came up on a breeze of earthy cologne. Murmuring...chorteling...laughing...welcoming me home.
The song of my River.
Copyright-Katie Lee. Box 395, Jerome, AZ.86331--510/634-8078